Portside

This new Cold War is not about communism taking over the world. It is more about returning to 19th century balance of power interests, borrowing the phrase John Kerry has used against Putin. It is about dividing up the spoils of the first Cold War among the triumphal capitalist democracies, as if Russia is defeated and short-lived. Pushing Western capitalism and NATO towards Russia was sure to touch off the current escalation, and worse may come.

The results were overwhelming. With 100 of the 103 precincts where the issue was on the ballot reporting, 87 percent of voters were backing the $15-an-hour wage. Just 13 percent voted against the advisory referendum. That huge level of support will strengthen the hand of activists who are encouraging the city council to consider a major wage hike.

Adjunct abuse is one of higher education's great sins. So why is a leading writing conference not discussing it?

The real story in Toronto, then, is not Rob Ford. It is how three decades of creeping neoliberalism have made it possible for one of North America’s most diverse cities in one of the west’s most robust democracies to elect a right-wing populist. It is how successive federal governments—Liberal and Conservative alike—shrank government spending by 20 percent as a share of GDP since the early 1990s and flattened the tax structure.

“We have people dying every day just because they don’t have access to health care,” one protester, Shayna Adelman, 32, said in an interview before she was jailed. “It’s morally repugnant to me. Sometimes you have to take dramatic action to get people’s attention.”

With The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson has reached the dizzying point of fantasizing about feeling nostalgic for nostalgia itself.

Mr. President! Ladies and Gentlemen! [Russian President Vladimir] Putin wants to solve the entire crisis in Ukraine militarily. He has not understood that humanity's problems are to be solved neither with soldiers nor with guns, quite the contrary. . . It is however the same thinking that dominated and dominates in the West: In the cases of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

Hoopsters honor Debs; Pacifica exec exed; Methodists measure up; St Pat's sans Guinness; Reclaiming digital privacy

In the years since the destruction of the occupations, the critique of inequality has only broadened and deepened in the U.S. Occupy should claim credit for getting it on the map, while political iterations old and new have been keeping it there. Today, the fight against inequality is taking greater institutional shape, and seemingly exerting more leverage, in places inspired by Occupy but moving beyond its initial tactics.

Benn stood by his principles, even when they were damaging to his career and his party’s electoral ambitions. “Charming, persuasive and sometimes deeply frustrating,” is how former British Home Secretary David Blunkett described him to The Independent newspaper. “[But] what you would learn from Tony Benn was to think for yourself.”